For centuries man has questioned whether life exists on other worlds. Do intelligent beings exist on Venus with her dense clouds and relatively moderate temperatures? Do the “canals” of Mars witness to human engineering as Percival Lowell maintained? And what of the other planetary systems throughout the universe, and of the other island universes, the spiral nebulae, which are scattered across the inconceivable vastness of space? Has man any right to assume that intelligent life exists solely on his “small and insignificant planet”?
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is making no such assumption. Beginning this fall and continuing at least into 1964, the NASA will launch a series of space probes toward Mars and Venus, the planets of our solar system most likely to yield evidence of life. The first of these experiments, Mariner II, which carries a 450-pound load of instruments, has now been launched on a three-month, 35-million-mile voyage toward Venus. If all goes as anticipated, the unmanned space craft will pass within 10,000 miles of the foggy planet and will radio back valuable information of its environment before going into orbit around the sun. In the months and years ahead subsequent probes will attempt to land instruments on both Mars and Venus, their Lilliputian instruments analyzing the soil and atmosphere and relaying the discovery of living organisms or their by-products to earth. It seems possible, therefore, that man will soon know whether life exists elsewhere within his solar system.
What import will these findings hold for Christian theology? If no life is discovered on either Mars or Venus, man on earth remains in the estimate of some researchers but a small activated speck in the myriads of worlds which occupy space. How can he believe that the compassion and activity of the Creator have been centered on this world for his particular benefit? More bluntly, the German Spencer once asked if we can believe that “the Cause to which we can put no limits in space or time, and of which our entire solar system is a relatively infinitesimal product, took the disguise of a man for the purpose of covenanting with a shepherd-chief in Syria.”
If man should discover life somewhere in the reaches of space, however, this too raises questions for a theology which views the earth as the stage of God’s great drama of creation and redemption. If this life is intelligent, can it be sinful? If it is sinful, does this not detract from the absolute nature of our Lord’s atonement? Or did Christ die for these beings also, thereby leaving us with a missionary imperative for their conversion? Will we one day have a David Livingstone for Mars?
Neither of the dilemmas posed by this alternative is as problematic for Christian theology as many have supposed. It is to be observed first that the Christian Church has never maintained that mankind is the sole species of intelligent created beings in the universe. On the contrary, Scripture speaks frequently of both angels and demons, and of these in such large numbers as to overwhelm imagination. These beings, we may suppose, have access to all parts of the material universe. Secondly, should other worlds possess other sinful beings—which seems improbable—the fact is hardly disruptive of evangelical theology. To suppose that there are other inhabited worlds, even thousands of them, does not detract in the slightest from the value of the soul in this one. “Man is not less great,” said Scotland’s James Orr, “because he is not alone great. If he is a spiritual being,—if he has a soul of infinite worth, which is the Christian assumption,—that fact is not affected though there were a whole universe of other spiritual beings.” In such circumstances the atonement of our Lord is not less significant because it occurred in this world for the redemption of mankind. The “good news” would be as welcome on Venus or Mars as upon the farthest reaches of the earth.
If it should be demonstrated that life exists solely on the earth—a demonstration which appears impossible by our present scientific resources—then how significant is this! If this world alone is overcome by sin, then it is worthy of God to redeem it. This is certainly the teaching of Christ’s parable of the lost sheep. Though all the flock but one was safe, the compassion of the shepherd drove him to rescue that one. Certainly among the joys of the Christian life is to know that God’s love extends even to us, regardless of how insignificant we may be by human or by cosmic standards.
But the final reply to the objections which see the existence or non-existence of life on other planets as detrimental to the uniqueness of the biblical revelation is this: the scope of God’s purpose on this small planet is not confined to man alone, but it includes the whole of creation. Christ’s death and resurrection and the living of the Christian life by those who attempt to follow him are eternally significant. Peter tells us that even the angels desire to know these things. Paul reminds us that our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against “principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world.” On a scale of such grandeur man is not reduced to insignificance. Rather he becomes eternally and infinitely important, just as his Creator by the incarnation and death of his Son has revealed that he regards him. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
What will man discover on other planets if God permits him to journey there? It is impossible to say. But one thing is certain. He will export his sin with him. And wherever that takes place, the Gospel of Christ will be forever relevant—on Mars, on Venus or throughout the infinite reaches of space.
Confusion Over Criteria A Sign That Morality Is Declining
A recent Saturday Evening Post editorial confesses, “We do not know how anyone would begin to measure the morality of 185,000,000 people.” But this admitted inability does not restrain the Post even momentarily from an assessment of our national morality. It declares that human morality has not changed since the days of Eve and that public voices decrying a progressive moral decay in America are pessimistically generalizing on moral exceptions.
This emphasis on the lack of assured criteria to judge the morality of the American people is apparently voiced to undercut the disturbing multiplication of publicly voiced judgments about moral decay, and to support more optimistic assessments. Yet the confession is a boomerang, disqualifying any writer from rendering verdict on “ ‘Moral Decay’ in America.”
There are of course ways of measuring a nation’s morality and means for detecting whether progressive moral decay is present. One legitimate manner is to consider the things of which a nation is ashamed. Of some things decent men and decent societies have always been ashamed. Homosexuality is one of them. The shame about homosexuality is not that the practice today is being faced and dealt with. This is all to the good. The shame is rather that its practice is being increasingly and openly admitted and discussed without shame.
In June the Supreme Court reversed a Post Office decision to ban three male magazines featuring male nudes and designed to appeal to homosexuals. The decision seems not to have embarrassed the American public. But even more striking evidence of the fadeout of the earlier shame associated with homosexuality is the request for open, public discussions of homosexuality on radio and television. And the request comes not from preachers and moralists, but from homosexuals themselves. They desire to confront the public with the subject at the corner magazine stands. They also desire to carry their case into the American homes so that they can there plead their claim to be normal people before as vast an audience as possible. Such discussions have already occurred on both West Coast TV and radio. Recently a radio station in the East carried a panel discussion on the subject by eight homosexuals. The program, according to The New York Times, was believed to be the first of its kind in the New York area. Who brought this “first” about? The public relations director of the Homosexual League of America who protested to the station that homosexuals were a minority not receiving their share of time on the air!
Is the moral climate in America changing? When the change in climate is great and abrupt, no delicate or as yet unmade instruments are needed to make the detection and to assess the change. A man on the street with a wet finger in the wind is enough.
German Scholars Turning From Bultmann’S Theories
For over a decade Rudolph Bultmann has held theological preeminence on the European continent. Valid and persistent criticism has failed to dislodge his theories in favor of other theological approaches. Now, however, indications are multiplying that previously scattered critiques of Bultmann’s theology are encouraging desertion of Bultmann’s premises and even of the “Form Criticism” on which he builds. It is not so much a primary dissatisfaction with Bultmann’s existential approach to Christian theology, nor even with Formgeschichte itself, that lies at the basis of this revolt, but a growing awareness of his inadequate handling of New Testament data and the resulting instability of his theology.
The revolt against Bultmannism is more and more evident among New Testament scholars. Writing for the June issue of Theologische Literaturzeitung (founded in 1875 by Emil Schurer and Adolf von Harnack), Johannes Schneider, retired professor of New Testament in East Berlin’s Humboldt University, tells the theological world that an influential school of theologians is insistently reviving the question: Does the communication of the Gospel as recorded in the New Testament have its source in the Sitz im Leben of the early Church, as Bultmann has maintained, or is this source to be discovered in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ himself? Among such newly influential theologians Schneider names S. and E. Fascher, Jean de Fraine, H. Risenfeld, W. Manson, H. Schumann and Oscar Cullmann.
The nature of the New Testament Church is crucial for Bultmann’s approach to New Testament theology. Operating under the assumption of the Formgeschichteschool—that a period of oral transmission of the Gospel message intervened between the years of Christ’s ministry and the recording of the traditions in the New Testament Scriptures—Bultmann envisions a creative church, which superimposed its own world picture upon what it had received of the times and teachings of Jesus. Because of the resulting distortion, Bultmann deems it necessary to reject the New Testament “mythology” and to ask again, in contemporary terms, what the life of Christ must mean for us today. On his premises Scripture is in no sense an historically accurate picture of Jesus Christ nor of the content or significance of his teaching.
But is Bultmann’s picture of the early Church correct? Not according to the theologians cited by Schneider. How could a small and insignificant Church, composed largely of simple, lower-class people, create the sublime theology of the New Testament Scriptures? It is surely more accurate to affirm, as does Risenfeld, that the Church was the recipient of the tradition and not the creator of it, a tradition received from eyewitnesses, who had received their teaching from Christ, and preserved with the same attention to detail that was characteristic of the Jewish synagogue.
But Bultmann is vulnerable on other counts as well. If a corrected understanding of the early Church must see in it a recipient of the Gospel traditions and not a creator of them, then Bultmann is overlooking the obvious significance of Jesus Christ as teacher. Rabbilike, Jesus must have impressed his words upon his disciples, to the point of sheer memorization, commanding them to teach what he had taught them in his lifetime. From the very beginning, therefore, the Gospel message consisted of more than a sole proclamation of the Cross and Resurrection. It must have included Christ’s ethics, his parables, and his teachings about the Kingdom. Secondly, Bultmann seems blind in his arbitrary rejection of the Messianic consciousness of Christ. How were unlearned disciples to understand the meaning of the cross if Jesus had not declared the significance of his ministry and his death to them beforehand? There could be a post-Easter confession among the disciples, as Schurmann has maintained, only because there was a pre-Easter confession of Christ as Lord and Saviour.
American theology has always followed puppy-dog-like behind the giants of the European schools. Will American theology be found still imitating Bultmann long after he has lost significance on the European continent? Schneider feels that the new theological trend may in time overthrow the seeming certainties of research, the “ruling” concepts of European theology, and revive an almost dogma-like view of the early Christian transmission. American theologians could yet lead the way in a return to a sound view of Scripture, and in so doing bring to the confused religious scene a more authentic picture of the life and ministry and teaching of the Son of God.
Salute To A Champion Of Constitutional Government
The marble halls of the Supreme Court building now echo an emptiness which reaches to the far corners of the nation. The retirement of Justice Felix Frankfurter after 23 years of distinguished service to his country takes from the bench one of the most influential judges of this generation. His brilliance, his ebullience, his legal precision—these will be sorely missed, for he put them in the service of an ideal which, in global perspective, has come upon hard times: the maintenance of government by law rather than by men. Today this ideal is confronted the world over by men on white horses followed closely by tanks.
Justice Frankfurter’s career reflects a certain irony. His appointment by Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 occasioned fears on the part of conservatives, who would later come to hail him as a bulwark on the court for constitutional government. For though he was, and remained, a liberal in his own social and political views, his elevation to the court produced a champion of the separation of inherent powers of the different branches of government. He would thus vote to uphold laws he personally thought unwise. He called for judicial restraint in deference to federal and state legislators. “It is not easy,” he once wrote, “to stand aloof and allow want of wisdom to prevail.… But it is not the business of this court to pronounce policy.”
Frankfurter is a Jew, and President Kennedy followed political custom in naming as his successor Secretary of Labor Arthur J. Goldberg, who is also Jewish. And like Frankfurter, Goldberg is noted as a legal technician and is a liberal. Formerly a labor lawyer, he managed to shed the label of labor spokesman once he assumed his cabinet post. What posture he will take in response to his new duties, may well be decisive in major issues to confront a divided court.
Public Welfare Versus The Welfare State
There is a vast difference between the responsibility of government to promote and to protect the public welfare and the adoption of those measures which create a “welfare state.”
Every government must promulgate and enforce laws to protect its citizens. These laws concern sanitation, the prevention of disease, the rights of business, and of labor, and the general protection which is necessary for the living of a peaceful and normal human life. Such laws promote the public welfare. The government establishes these laws, and it arbitrates them. It lays down the rules of the game and then, like an umpire, insures that they are followed by the players.
The welfare state operates on a different principle. It believes that the government is wiser than the people, that it is better able to provide for them than the people are to provide for themselves. In this situation the “umpire” attempts to play the game himself, not only making the rules but also competing with the players.
Unfortunately, the concept of the welfare state seems to be gaining strength within our country, and we are beset on every side by its effects. We witness the mirage of federal aid, so dear to the politician and so misleading. As emergency measures tend to resolve themselves into continuing programs, federal aid leads more and more to the feeling that the government owes its citizens a living. We note inefficiency and waste in government bureaucracy. This has been startlingly illustrated by the cost of $9,000 per Peace Corpsman as compared to $2,000 for missionaries of the major denominational boards. On many fronts we note the prevailing philosophy that the people can and should turn to the government for things which they, as individuals or states or communities, should be doing for themselves.
When people exchange freedom for security they have taken the first step toward an internal decadance. The next step is taken when the loss of initiative occurs in favor of dependence. The final stage witnesses corruption through stagnation.
The measures of the welfare state do something deep down to character itself. If the Christian does not resist them, who will?
